Even companies worth billions of dollars need a place to call home. As we have covered, expanding into Japan requires careful navigation to find the right allies and also the right home base. The Entrepreneur Group for Growing Japan (Egg Japan), a little-known project of Mitsubishi Group’s Mitsubishi Estate, has made a successful business in guiding foreign companies to the right people and places.

The client roster is a mini who’s who of billion dollar valuations. Box, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are all listed. Companies get set up in swanky offices in Tokyo’s Marunouchi area and also get access to elite networking circles, where they can make connections with some of the top lawyers, politicians, and CEOs in the city. Companies looking to make a stealthy entry into Japan are also welcome. Tech in Asia independently confirmed that at least one other Silicon Valley giant has taken up residence in an Egg Japan office. Even so, Mitsubishi assiduously protected that firm’s identity during the interview.

As the client list suggests, these services are not cheap. But if cost is not a concern, you can enjoy a headache-free stay in Tokyo. Offices are typically modestly sized as they target companies housing fewer than ten people. The shared common areas will be familiar to most startups – lounge spaces with snacks and foosball, and meeting rooms with floor-to-ceiling dry erase boards. Catering can also be arranged for certain restaurants.

Those offices were established in 2013 but Mitsubishi Estate has been supporting startups for far longer. Though a real-estate focused subsidiary of the sprawling Mitsubishi Group, Mitsubishi Estate has been overseeing this project with a different goal in mind. “Our purpose is to help companies expand their business and their networks,” says Masato Aikawa, the general manager of the company’s client business development office.

This tradition dates back to 2000 when it created Marunouchi Frontier, an organization for supporting Japanese startups. Like Tohmatsu Venture Support (which is a member company of the still-active group), it connected startups with the professional services they needed to push their businesses forward. Well-known firms like Morrison & Foerster, KPMG, and Asahi Tax Corporation are all connected to Marunouchi Frontier.

Egg Japan’s many clients

In 2002, another piece of the puzzle fell into place with the introduction of Tokyo 21c Club, an exclusive incubation business club. Though targeted at new businesses, a good portion of the membership overlaps with the Marunouchi Frontier. Finally, in 2007, Egg Japan made its debut and established offices and a professional club for startups right across from Tokyo station. At last, Mitsubishi Estate capitalized on the know-how it had accumulated and Egg Japan’s prime location in one of Tokyo’s business centers.

Using the vast networks of Tokyo 21c Club and Marunouchi Frontier, Mitsubishi Estate began a charm offensive. By 2013, the first tenants, which included LinkedIn, arrived.

One year later, the early reviews are positive and companies like Opower Japan, Draper Nexus Venture Partners, Sozo Ventures, and Millennial Media have all moved into their own offices.

Egg Japan’s strong progress adds a new face to the “trusted broker” race in Japan. Traditional venture capital firms, corporate conglomerates, and a host of small-to-midsized consultancies are all vying to be known as an essential partner for foreign companies mulling a Japan entry. Mitsubishi Estate, with the storied history and strong corporate reputation of its sibling companies, seems like the last place to find startup support.

Yet, it has a growing number of satisfied customers sitting in gleaming offices overlooking the city and only a phone call or social mixer away from making powerful connections in Japan. The price tag might not be for everyone but the results seem hard to argue with.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/mitsubishi-guide-linkedin-box-pinterest-japan-market-expansion/feed/4Are you sexist and you don’t know it? Why you should ask yourself that if you’re in techhttps://www.techinasia.com/sexism-women-in-tech-face/
https://www.techinasia.com/sexism-women-in-tech-face/#commentsFri, 25 Jul 2014 03:48:46 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=186060

In the cool world of tech, gender discrimination is so uncool that it is rarely overt. But scratch the surface, and you will soon see shades of sexism in startup hubs the world over, from the Bay Area to Bangalore and Beijing. When it comes to women in tech, it seems like there are no borders – they face the same issues whether they are American, Chinese, or Indian.

Let’s begin their story in India.

Sukriti Vadula, president and co-founder of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Foundation (RAIF), chuckles when she recalls the day she walked into Simple Labs, a robotics company in Chennai, as an engineering student looking for part-time work. She wanted to learn all about embedded systems and automating her home. She knew the boss at Simple Labs and he knew her interest in the subject.

“But he was skeptical. He wondered if a girl would be able to come by everyday after college, work from 6pm to 9pm, and get back home close to ten,” she explains.

Vadula was the first woman to come up to him asking for a job. He thought she wouldn’t last for more than three days in an all-male, hard-tech workspace. But she did. In fact, Vadula went on to work with them – “the only woman in the team” – for a few years after graduation as well. Now, as robotics evangelizer at RAIF, she makes it a point to visit girls-only schools and colleges and hard-sell the subject.

Embroidery for girls, electronics for boys. That’s the usual norm for extra-curricular activities at Indian schools. Not many girls brave raised eyebrows, teachers’ ire, and worse to go play around with electronics. The social conditioning starts even earlier. Even educated parents nudge their girls toward medicine, humanities, and commerce over engineering. That’s partly because the archetype of an engineer is an asocial male. The gender stereotyping begins at home, continues through schools, and obviously extends to workplaces. So it is not much of a surprise that girls are a minority at engineering colleges, and a rare species in tech workplaces. This is despite the fact that girls outshine boys by a large margin in secondary school exams in every Indian state, even in less developed ones like Uttar Pradesh.

The few Indian women who do trickle into the tech job market face uncomfortable situations from the very outset – until they get so used to it that they stop noticing. During job interviews, a regular question thrown at women in tech is about her relationship status. Are you married? Do you intend to? Do you have a boyfriend? You hear versions of these even if you’re armed with degrees from top-notch universities. A radar scientist with India’s Defence Research and Development Organization recounts her experiences.

“I’m an IIT [Indian Institute of Technology] topper. I know my tech, enjoy working with technology, and can happily tackle any tech challenge. But these personal questions always got my hackles up. I had never thought of myself as a feminist, but eventually felt I must be one because I always countered questions about my relationship status with a retort or two. Now, I have grown blind to these sexisms as people respect my work,” she tells Tech in Asia. She requested we not disclose her identity because she works in a government organization.

These are stark situations, but you can argue that India isn’t a microcosm of the world. After all, the country has much catching up to do with more developed countries on a number of counts, from living standards to basic sanitation. But when it comes to gender discrimination in the tech sphere, it seems India is on par with the rest of the world – nowhere close to becoming gender-blind.

Subtle sexism at work

Ask any educated man if he believes in the need for gender equality at the workspace, he will swear by it. The ground reality tells another story.

For every Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer, there are countless other women who never got their due at work. Even in the US, it has been difficult for women to make their way to positions of power and influence in tech. Why else do you see so few women entrepreneurs? And the few who do make it hate the gender prefix they are forced to carry. ZipDial founder and CEO Valerie Wagoner bristled when Tech in Asia asked her about being a woman entrepreneur. “Don’t call me a woman founder,” she said.

She, of course, has a point. Does anyone ever say “male CEO” or “male techie?” Then how can you box women who head companies as female founders?

Recently, Tech in Asiainterviewed Natasha Bautista, assistant general manager of GrabTaxi Philippines. She also happens to be a runway model. The article on what it is like to be an attractive woman in tech sparked off an interesting discussion in our bloggers’ chatroom and on Twitter. Our writer had asked Bautista, “Have you ever intentionally played up your attractiveness in the business world?” And she replied:

This is embarrassing… I could say I’ve never intentionally used attractiveness to my advantage but my co-workers have ‘sold’ me multiple times to help close deals. I don’t mind as long as it’s still professional and it gets the job done.

Advertisements have always used pretty faces to sell, and I have worked in media organizations which use similar tactics. This is not the case at Tech in Asia where we have a diverse team – not just in gender, but in ethnicities and nationalities too.

The point remains, however, that a man is unlikely to face a similar question, however attractive he may be. “Attractive men and their advantages in tech” – when is the last time we encountered an article on that?

Nowadays, with stricter gender laws, more discussion about diversity, and an emphasis on political correctness, gender discrimination in startup hubs – which like to portray themselves as meritocracies – is rarely explicit. But subtle sexism is as pervasive as ever, and often the perpetrators are not even aware of it.

All boys club

A recent MIT study on entrepreneurs found that in the tech industry women founders represent less than seven percent of startups that get VC funding. It added:

Investors prefer pitches presented by a male entrepreneur compared with pitches by a female entrepreneur, even when the content of the pitch is the same. The effect is moderated by male physical attractiveness: attractive males were particularly persuasive, whereas physical attractiveness did not matter among female entrepreneurs.

In an article on LinkedIn, Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, writes:

I had considered Silicon Valley to be the perfect meritocracy – until I moved there. I was surprised to learn that there is a powerful boys’ club that provides arrogant young males with adulation, funding, and support.

He argues that Indian tech companies are at an advantage as the number of girls opting for IT education is climbing. Women constitute 38 to 40 percent of entry-level recruits. But Indian boards are as skewed as anywhere else.

“The majority of publicly traded Indian companies – 922 of 1,462 – have no women on their boards. Women hold barely five percent of board seats in India, in comparison with 17 percent in the United States. Indian IT companies have a bigger management problem. Look at the executive ranks of Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Tech Mahindra, and the others, and you will hardly find any women,” he points out.

According to an industry report released yesterday, only 30 percent of the tech workforce in India is women, and when it comes to the pay, they pocket about 29 percent less than men in similar jobs. Men earn about INR 359.25 (US$6) per hour on average while women are at INR 254.04 (US$4) per hour.

Only about 36 percent of India’s tech women get promoted to supervisory positions, while 52 percent of men climb the ladder. A study by global think-tank Center for Talent Innovation found that a shocking proportion of senior leaders in the science, engineering, and technology (SET) fields – 31 percent in the US, 51 percent in China, and 57 percent in India – felt that a woman would never get a top position at their company, no matter how able or high-performing.

But Japan is worse. The World Economic Forum ranks it 105 out of 136 countries on gender parity. On average, women earn only slightly over half of what men earn. Currently, only 9 percent of legislators, senior officials, and managers are women. If you thought that was bad, take this: women make up only two percent of corporate board members and fewer than one percent of executive committee members.

Numbers speak

Chew on this: Men outnumber women in technical jobs 3 to 1, even in companies that champion diversity. For instance, Google, which pioneered a diversity campaign in the tech space, has a workforce that’s about 30 percent women. LinkedIn, which has 5,400 employees working from Mountain View to Sao Paulo to Bangalore, is 61 percent male. Facebook is 85 percent men if you look at its tech team; overall, it’s 69 percent men. The Twitter tech team is 90 percent men, while its total workforce is 70 percent men.

We’re the first to admit that Google is miles from where we want to be – and that being totally clear about the extent of the problem is a really important part of the solution.

The US National Center for Education Statistics says that just 18 percent of all computer science degree holders in the US are women. That is one of the reasons Google cites for its skewed workforce. It has given over US$40 million to organizations working to bring computer science education to women and girls since 2010. It kicked off a Made with Code program, and gives US$1 million to 40 startup accelerators and incubators that pledge to increase the number of women entrepreneurs in their communities through #40Forward.

Gender gap at LinkedIn

LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter too are doing their bit to engage and support women in tech. LinkedIn runs an annual women’s hackday, DevelopHer, and has partnered with organizations focused on women in computing like the Anita Borg Institute. Facebook is partnering with the Anita Borg Institute as well as the National Center for Women and Information Technology. It is also supporting programs like Girls Who Code. Twitter has a number of employee-led affinity groups like WomEng (women in engineering), SWAT (super women at Twitter), TwUX (Twitter women in design), Blackbird (Tweeps of color), TwitterOpen (LGBTQ folks) and Alas (Latino and Latina employees) batting for diversity.

Gender gap at Twitter

Other companies are now acknowledging that while they are changing the world with technology, the scene is far from rosy for women.

Even in India, startups, accelerators, and industry bodies have begun to address the issue. Nasscom runs a Girls in Tech program along with Google, Microsoft launched a program called Codess and there are hackathons for women, like the recent one organized by Venturesity in Chennai.

We’re constantly asked ‘if you write any code’ when speaking about technical topics and giving technical presentations, despite just having given a talk on writing code. We’ve been harassed at these same conferences in person and online about our gender, looks, and technical expertise. We get asked if we’re the event planner or executive assistant on a regular basis. We regularly receive creepy, rapey e-mails where men describe what a perfect wife we would be and exactly how we should expect to be subjugated. Sometimes there are angry e-mails that threaten us to leave the industry, because ‘it doesn’t need anymore c**ts ruining it.’

What we want most is for people to read and understand what death by a thousand cuts feels like, and then understand why we feel sad and angry at the tech industry. We also want you to understand that more still needs to be done.

They also listed a bunch of applaudable efforts towards diversity at workplaces, asking readers to volunteer their time and energy to helpful programs instead of just paying lip-service to gender issues.

According to Elaine Wherry, co-founder of Meebo which was acquired by Google a couple years ago, it is up to us to continue the hard work of the women who fought before us, and, with a bit more time and determination, write this final chapter.

Anonymous social apps like Whisper and Secret have blown up in the US lately, attracting media attention for their risque content and foaming valuations. In particular, Secret earned a reputation as the unofficial tabloid for the Silicon Valley startup community, as entrepreneurs and impostors alike share the latest industry gossip without fear of getting ratted out. Among other high-profile incidents, news of a female employee’s departure from Github amidst an alleged sexual harassment incident first broke on the app, as did information regarding the latest venture from former Square and Paypal exec Keith Rabois.

While Secret’s traction in the Valley might have come about unintentionally, one Chinese company is trying to replicate its success in the west by borrowing from the basic concept and placing it directly in a workplace context. The result – Tusi (or “toast” in English), an app that’s already broadcasting some dark secrets from big-name Chinese companies.

We’ve previously covered two Chinese apps that “drew inspiration from” Secret and Whisper. But while those apps merely imported the anonymous social concept, Tusi arguably improves on Secret.

After downloading the app, users must register for Tusi using either their QQ or Weibo accounts. Afterwards, you’ll be asked to specify the name of the company you work for by entering it in a search field or specifying from a list.

Tusi features a main feed that appears to aggregate recent posts according to popularity, along with theme-specific (office romances, weird coworkers) and company specific feeds.

Posting a rumor works more or less like the same as Secret or Whisper, albeit with an added twist – stickers are mandatory. Along with a few other characters, Tusi’s toast-faced mascot is here to liven up your workplace gossip.

Already, users claiming to work at high-profile Chinese companies like Baidu and Alibaba have sent out posts on Tusi.

It doesn’t look like Tusi imposes any sort of verification check on its users’ identities – this writer registered as a Xiaomi employee. Implementing these sorts of checks would improve the credibility of the rumors that surface on Tusi, but of course, that might deter people from actually using it to spill the beans.

Perhaps that’s why Dajie, the company behind the app, appears to be downplaying its involvement. While the LinkedIn-esque company created Tusi, there’s no button in Tusi that redirects to the Dajie homepage or mobile app. However, since Tusi is barely a week old, it seems quite likely it will evolve if it proves to be a hit. According to Sina Tech, the company is currently hoping to add more social elements to its core social network for white-collar workers – Tusi likely marks the first step in that process.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/tusi-puts-whisper-in-the-workplace-helping-white-collar-workers-dish-the-dirt-anonymous-social-app-secret/feed/0These 7 US startups show that your business can survive in Chinahttps://www.techinasia.com/case-study-how-american-startups-survive-in-china/
https://www.techinasia.com/case-study-how-american-startups-survive-in-china/#commentsMon, 09 Jun 2014 07:29:32 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=180611Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, and nearly everything that Google produces – all blocked in China. But that’s not discouraging some US startups from entering the notorious tricky and divergent Chinese market.

Let’s take a look at the fate of seven American ventures in China – including Evernote, LinkedIn, Uber – and see if their progress holds any lessons for other overseas apps and services looking for a slice of the Chinese web.

We’ve ranked these seven US startups on their performance so far in China and given them a score out of 10 for their ability to (so far) cut it in a tough, unique market. Using a mix of user numbers where available, app store ratings and comments, and the gut feeling from someone who likes to peek at what other people are using on their phones whilst on the subway (yes, not exactly scientific), we’ve put the list in order of which US firm is making the best job of their Chinese expansion. First places goes to…

Evernote

Official China launch: May 2012

Success rate thus far in China: 9.2 / 10

Having already accrued some Chinese users over the course of 2011, Evernote arrived in China in May 2012 with local staff and a new brand name. Indeed, operating in China necessitated a whole different service that’s disconnected from the international version of Evernote. In China, it’s branded as Yinxiang Biji.

Upon launch, the Evernote blog cautioned people: “[U]sers of Yinxiang Biji should be aware that Chinese authorities may have the right to access their data according to current regulations.” That’s why a spin-off service was needed. The Chinese service lacks collaborative notes.

Evernote’s main rival – indeed, its larger competitor – is Netease’s (NASDAQ:NTES) Youdao YunBiJi. The Chinese web giant hit 15 million users for its note syncing app last summer, shortly after Evernote grew to four million Chinese users. But since then Evernote managed to double its China user-base to eight million as of November last year.

Netease is being aggressive with pricing, offering 80 percent of Evernote’s premium features for free. Netease also has the advantage of being able to cross-promote its notes app in its popular news-reader apps – effectively giving it free advertising. In contrast, Evernote is on its own.

While the Youdao Yunbiji app is more popular than Evernote’s Chinese app in the local app stores, Evernote is holding up well with plenty of comments and five-star ratings on the China iOS store, and over 1,200 ‘likes’ on the Wandoujia store.

LinkedIn

Official China launch: February 2014 (in beta)

Success rate thus far in China: 8.9 / 10

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) is the largest of the American ‘startups’ seeking out a niche in China away from the controversies surrounding broader social media networks like Facebook. LinkedIn, with its focus on business connections, has never been blocked in China. It even managed to grow for years without a Chinese version of its site.

China is the land of business connections, encapsulated in the term guanxi. Who you know – and how well you charm, wine, and dine (and perhaps bribe) – gets you very far. That’s what LinkedIn needs to tap into in China, despite it being a slightly different dynamic than seen among businesspeople in the West.

Due to the strength of China’s tech ecosystem, LinkedIn – like all the other US apps on this list – already has homegrown rivals in this business networking niche. Tianji is larger than LinkedIn in China with over 10 million users back in 2012; LinkedIn recently revealed it has about five million users in China. Tianji is run by a French company called Viadeo, so it’s technically also an overseas startup.

LinkedIn is finally fighting back in 2014. A Chinese version of LinkedIn appeared in beta form in February this year, though many social features are missing at this stage. Also missing are the Groups feature and the option to self-publish articles on users’ profiles as LinkedIn walks a fine line between China’s laws and regulations regarding media content. It’s possible these features will be added in later.

But LinkedIn hasn’t been able to avoid dealing with censorship in China. Just last week, a number of prominent users noticed that their shared links to politically sensitive content were removed. LinkedIn’s official statement on the issue confirmed that its new censorship practices are here to stay. “[I]t’s clear to us that in order to create value for our members in China and around the world, we will need to implement the Chinese government’s restrictions on content,” a section of the statement read. That creates a two-tier system where users inside China – and content viewable in China – are treated differently from the rest of the world. But most Chinese users of LinkedIn won’t even realise this is happening and it’s unlikely to hamper the site’s growth.

LinkedIn’s prospects in China got a huge boost at the start of the year as the phenomenally popular messaging app WeChat added in support for users to bind a LinkedIn account to their WeChat profile.

Flipboard

Official China launch: December 2011

Success rate thus far in China: 8.5 / 10

Flipboard got blocked in China in the summer of 2011. By the end of the year, the magazine-style reader app had figured out a way to overcome the ban – by making a separate version of its app for the China market. The Flipboard China edition arrived first on iPad, and by March 2012 it appeared on iOS, eventually reaching Android in June that year.

The global version of Flipboard got unblocked at some point, but by August 2013 it was once again slapped down by Net Nanny. The Chinese version of the app has never been blocked.

There are numerous magazine-style reader apps in China, such as Zaker, as well as Netease Cloud Reader, so Flipboard has a battle to stand out from the crowd and be seen in China’s numerous third-party Android app stores. Flipboard partnered with two such stores – Wandoujia and AppChina – to ensure the app is as visible as possible.

While Flipboard isn’t as popular as Zaker on the app stores in China, Flipboard is still performing strongly.

Uber

Official China launch: August 2013

Success rate thus far in China: 8.3 / 10

Uber first rolled into China on the streets of Shanghai in August 2013. By February of this year, the soft-launch phase was over, and the mobile-connected limo service was ready to drive into the limelight. Sam Gellman, Uber’s head of growth for Asia, said at the hard-launch event that demand in Shanghai exploded, displaying the fastest growth of any of Uber’s markets around the world in its first six months.

Uber is now running in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Beijing too.

The UberBlack service – wherein Uber recruits chauffeurs to join its network exclusively – has plenty of offline rivals in China, as well as one major online rival in the form of Yongche. But Uber sets itself apart by its flexibility and its luxury appeal.

Nonetheless, Uber will have to battle offline limo companies that have years of guanxi (there’s that word again) with companies and can offer lower rates for some companies who bring in a lot of business. Uber is already the priciest option in the market.

Uber’s app is growing slowly on both the iOS China store and Wandoujia – though rival Yongche has had a lot more time to build up users and enthusiasm for its app. On the plus side, Uber is great at doing promotions, and knows its elite customer-base well. The service lends itself to fun promotions, as Uber has done in other markets with things like the on-demand ice cream truck in New York and the on-call dragon dance troupe in Singapore.

TuneIn

Official China launch: April 2012

Success rate thus far in China: 8 / 10

In order to enter the Chinese market officially, TuneIn opted to self-censor its radio streams for users located in China. As we noted upon its China entry in April 2012, attempting to play BBC Radio 4 instead redirected anyone in China to a state-approved radio channel. A TuneIn representative explained, “We are complying with Chinese government regulations to remove aspects of our service in China.”

With only one convincing and good-looking China-made app for streaming radio online, TuneIn seems to be doing well in the app stores. It’s also boosted by other partnerships in China, and comes preinstalled on a number of car entertainment systems.

Official China launch: April 2014

Success rate thus far in China: 6 / 10

There are already a handful of homegrown save-it-for-later apps, but they’re mostly a niche preference for geeks. The same will likely be true for Pocket.

It’s too early to tell how Pocket can perform in China in terms of user numbers. It’s been slow in adding support for Asian languages, so it might have missed the earlier hype for such apps. Also a big danger is the fact that WeChat is effectively used as a reading app by Chinese people. While WeChat and Weibo don’t support offline reading, Pocket is arriving at a time when ubiquitous local apps are already cornering part of the market.

Nonetheless, Pocket is starting its China debut with a huge bang, getting more China iOS store ratings than any of these other US apps on the list – a whopping 132 ratings, mostly positive and five-star – and seeing a huge boost in reviews and engagement in the days since its Chinese-language update rolled out.

Path

Official China launch: summer 2012

Success rate thus far in China: 5 / 10

Path founder and CEO Dave Morin said in September 2012 that China is the app’s second biggest country. Indonesia has since surpassed China.

However, both Path and its clones have since fallen out of favor. Messaging apps are on the rise – mainly just WeChat in China – and that has caused many people to abandon other social apps. Even Sina Weibo is suffering as WeChat becomes a hub for a great deal more than just messaging – for status updates from friends, for photos, reading and sharing news, telling people what you’re listening to. All that should be Path’s speciality, but WeChat is doing it all – and a lot more.

You can survive on the Chinese web, but…

What lessons can be drawn from these American tech ventures? Self-censorship is a running theme for nearly all these US startups entering China. No matter how niche the service, China’s strict media regulations will likely impact in some way, necessitating your startup altering or removing aspects of the app/service. To enter the market, you’ll likely need to create a product that’s separate or parallel from your international app.

What else stands out? In a word, enterprise. No overseas company will be allowed to compete in sectors like general media, search, or operate a broad and uncensored social media site. The key to success in China seems to be having a very niche product aimed at China’s urbanites, business people, and most tech-savvy individuals – ones who can appreciate how it stands out from the inevitable flock of local rivals.

It’s also important for overseas startups to iterate quickly with a local product team to stay ahead of local competitors. Engage actively with users via Sina Weibo, WeChat, Youku – and anything else that’s relevant. Learn lessons from Chinese companies like Xiaomi – engage on social media, know what your customers are into, and get your China product manager to speak out and inspire your tech-savvy customers. If you’re too late – like Pocket – or too detached – like Path – you’ll be lucky to gain any meaningful traction in the country.

Where there are exceptions to the rule, it’s worth noting that there are many sites for whom their China survival rests on a knife-edge, on the flick of a censor’s switch. Instagram has survived in China through its startup phase and even into its adoption by Facebook. But such a broad social network could be turned off in seconds in China – just a few photos of a protest happening in a Chinese city and the app will be blocked. It could happen any day now.

We try to avoid the cliché ‘1.3 billion’ figure on Tech in Asia when we write about China because it applies to so few companies that truly have universal products. You should aim at 1.3 billion Chinese consumers only if you sell Coke, or washing powder, or run a search engine. US startups – or any overseas web business – should ignore that landmark number because you’re never going to be allowed to do anything that’ll reach everyone online in China. Instead, find a niche, know how many people in China that sector entails – ten million? 100 million? It doesn’t matter – and go make something that’ll blow their minds.

An earlier version of this article first appeared in the Tech in Asia Emag, which is exclusive to our Insights subscribers. Find out more about TiA Insights.

When LinkedIn (NYSE:LKED), the popular career-oriented social network, launched a localized beta site for mainland Chinese users earlier this year, the company made it clear that it would adhere to the country’s strict policies regarding the suppression of politically sensitive content. Now LinkedIn is acting on its promise, as users both inside and outside mainland China have reported that posts about the 25th anniversary of the so-called June 4th incident at Tiananmen Square have been removed.

Earlier today, Business Spectator’s Fergus Ryan reported that after he shared an English-language piece on the detainment of artist-activist Guo Jian from his home in Beijing, he received a notice from LinkedIn informing him “the content will not be seen by LinkedIn members.”

Patrick Poon, a Hong Kong-based PhD candidate and activist, claimed to receive the same message from LinkedIn after sharing a video from Amnesty International – an organization which has no presence in China. He later received a follow up message clarifying that the content in question will be visible to all users except for those located in the People’s Republic of China.

In theory, assuming that Work and Poon were posting on an international variant of LinkedIn and not linkedin.cn, their content should not be subject to censorship because Hong Kong remains unaffected by the Great Firewall and mainland censorship practices. Linkedin told the Daily Beast that the incidents were accidents.

For what it’s worth, earlier today this writer registered an account in Linkedin.cn (signing up as a user residing in mainland China, albeit from his home in Taipei) and shared three politically sensitive articles, two in Chinese, and one in English from CNN. LinkedIn has yet to remove the posts, but then again, the account has an extremely small network of connections.

LinkedIn’s beta launch in China, along with its appointment of Derek Shen as president of its domestic operations there, made it one of the few high-profile, US-based social networks to go boldly forth into the Middle Kingdom. Twitter and Facebook – which are both blocked in the country – have each paidlip service to China’s market potential, yet neither has announced plans to launch a localized, consumer-facing product for the country’s 2 billion citizens. That’s likely because Sina Weibo and Tencent’s WeChat (known domestically as Weixin) already dominate China’s social media environment, but the headaches that accompany issues surrounding censorship certainly have also led the firms to pause before jumping.

LinkedIn has always existed in the realm of white-collar career networking – not exactly the best arena for airing political causes. In a blog post announcing its arrival in China, CEO Jeff Weiner wrote: “LinkedIn strongly supports freedom of expression and fundamentally disagrees with government censorship. At the same time, we also believe that LinkedIn’s absence in China would deny Chinese professionals a means to connect with others on our global platform, thereby limiting the ability of individual Chinese citizens to pursue and realize the economic opportunities, dreams and rights most important to them.”

UPDATE: Tech in Asia received the following statement from LinkedIn regarding the matter of censorship:

LinkedIn’s goal in China is to connect Chinese professionals with each other and with our more than 300 million existing members globally, so they can create economic opportunities for one another. We’ve long recognized that offering a localized version of LinkedIn in China would likely mean adherence to censorship requirements of the Chinese government on Internet platforms. These requirements have just recently gone into effect.

We are strongly in support of freedom of expression. But, as we said at the time of our launch in February, it’s clear to us that in order to create value for our members in China and around the world, we will need to implement the Chinese government’s restrictions on content, when and to the extent required. We will also continue to be transparent about how we conduct business in China and use multiple avenues to notify impacted members within China about our practices.

A LinkedIn spokesperson also clarified that if an international user posts content that’s restricted in China, it will remain accessible to all users except for those within China. Meanwhile, if a Chinese user attempts to send out restricted content from the country, it will remain inaccessible to all users, regardless of where they reside. LinkedIn states that this latter policy is to protect the privacy of the user who posted the content.

With a Chinese-language site and WeChat integration, professional social network LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) is going after China’s young up-and-comers. Many people were skeptical that a Western social network would be allowed over the country’s Great Firewall, but LinkedIn so far has been able to stay on the censors’ good side.

“LinkedIn and maybe Snapchat are the only ones that can get regulatory approval here in China,” said Youku CEO Victor Koo in response to an audience question at last week’s China 2.0 forum. The event at Beijing’s Peking University also brought Derek Shen, the newly appointed president of LinkedIn China, to the stage.

Shen says his company has three rules when it comes to matters of censorship: follow the government restrictions, be transparent about how those restrictions affect the user and the site, and protect users’ data. LinkedIn China’s efforts to stay in line are evident when comparing it to the international version. Obviously, Twitter and Facebook integration are nowhere to be found. Similarly, the Groups feature and the option to self-publish articles on users’ profiles are also missing, although these could be added in later versions.

So it seems LinkedIn is fully complying with everything the government would ask, but that doesn’t guarantee the social network success.

What LinkedIn can learn from WeChat

One Chinese audience member at the forum posed a particularly insightful question to Shen: In a society where people guard their close connections and often keep their professional contacts a secret, how will LinkedIn get users to open up and share their professional network with the world?

Compared to Western business culture, Chinese people keep their cards close to their chest. Publicly broadcasting one’s professional contacts is a very foreign concept, yet it serves as the backbone of LinkedIn. This is a huge cultural barrier that LinkedIn will have to overcome if it ever wants to garner real success in China.

In response, Shen cited a global survey that showed only six percent of employees in China are happy with their jobs. Shen says LinkedIn provides an escape from unhappy work for those open to it.

In comparison, WeChat, although not necessarily by design, has become a huge resource for job seekers, employers, and other professional networkers in China because of its more private model. Many groups of 100 to 500 people consist solely of like-minded professionals, and participation requires an invitation from someone already inside a group. Furthermore, other people’s contacts are not visible.

Although WeChat integration is a noteworthy first step, LinkedIn will still have to find ways to localize for the much more private relationship structure found here. Trying to change the mindset of an entire society will undoubtedly result in failure.

LinkedIn is still young in China, though, and Shen emphasized that the China branch essentially functions like a startup. This could give it the agility it requires to adapt to local needs and wants. Shen said 70 percent of China’s current four million or so users are from the top four cities, and his team is only focusing on “gold collar” professionals – one rung above white collar – for the time being.

LinkedIn, the global social network for working professionals, has ramped up its hiring efforts in China after officially launching there back in February. According to job postings on the website, the company seeking several candidates to fill positions such as events manager, head of marketing, head of sales, and chief editor for LinkedIn Pulse, the company’s up-and-coming news aggregation branch.

“The China editor will oversee a Mandarin version of Pulse (formerly LinkedIn Today), LinkedIn’s widely heralded professional content product,” reads the job description. “Currently, 1.5 million English-language publishers feed into the product. Now, for the first time, Pulse will be available in China — and the right candidate will get the chance to shape and direct the content that members receive. Forging and fostering relationships with publishers to ensure their content is accessible, along with generating analysis on what’s working and what’s not and coming up with ways to increase engagement via content will come naturally to the successful candidate.”

Recruitment in China should come as a no surprise given that the company appointed its first president of LinkedIn China (or Lingying, as it’s now known in the country) only eight weeks ago. But the opening for a Chinese LinkedIn Pulse editor indicates that LinkedIn China won’t shy away from launching its full feature set in the Middle Kingdom.

As a news reader app that lets users share and comment on articles written by LinkedIn members, LinkedIn Pulse is the exact sort of service that would attract the attention of Chinese censors. At the same time, as a workplace-oriented social network, LinkedIn has never been an ideal arena for social media users looking to attract political controversy. Content on the English-language Pulse tends to be light and breezy business-y reading – and there’s no dearth of breezy business-y reading in Chinese-language online media. Chances that LinkedIn will have to pull its censorship levers in the manner of Tencent with WeChat yesterday seem pretty slim, but the launch of Pulse for China means that those levers will nevertheless have to be in place.

Upon the announcement of LinkedIn’s arrival in China, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner penned a blog post stating “[g]overnment restrictions on content will be implemented only when and to the extent required.” The company claims that over four million Chinese users are already registered on its English-language international version.

On the Chinese desktop version, users will find Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo options to import contacts, as well as a few Chinese email providers. Unlike the international version, Twitter and Facebook are nowhere to be found.

Similarly, the Groups feature and the option to self-publish articles on users’ profiles are also missing, although these could be added in later versions. LinkedIn has to walk a fine line between China’s laws and regulations regarding user-generated content and creating a user experience equivalent to its global site.

Many domestic social networks similar LinkedIn have tried and failed in the Chinese market. It also already has several solid popular recruitment websites, such as ChinaHR, 51Job, and Zhaopin.

Before the Chinese version was released, the latest version of messaging and social app WeChat allowed users to bind their LinkedIn profiles to their accounts. The integration into China’s most widely-used app could prove invaluable to LinkedIn’s career in China.

LinkedIn also has localized versions in Indonesian, Thai, Malaysian, Japanese, and Tagalog.

Professional social network LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) announced yesterday that it has acquired Philippines- and US-based job search company Bright. TheBobbery reports the deal is worth $120 million, making it LinkedIn’s largest acquisition to date.

The three-year-old startup takes a big data approach to job hunting, matching job seekers to employers with a calculated “Bright Score” so employers don’t have to look over every resume separately. The aim is to increase efficiency and find better matches for both parties.

Bright has seven million monthly active users and 2.5 million indexed jobs. Current Bright users will be able to access existing date until the deal is expected to be completed next month. Bright will then be integrated into LinkedIn. LinkedIn already has features like “Jobs You May Be Interested In” and LinkedIn Recruiter, so these will likely be bolstered by Bright’s tech.

On Bright’s blog, the announcement reads, “We decided to join LinkedIn because of what we lacked – the ability to apply this technology across the entire economy.”

We assembled an incredible team. In their previous lives, they had been nuclear physicists, astrophysicists, geophysicists, neuroscientists, organizational psychologists, teachers (for America), and even a five-time Jeopardy champion. They were brought together by a belief that finding a job should be easier than splitting an atom.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-acquires-philippine-job-search-startup-bright-120-million/feed/0Screenshots of next WeChat update show LinkedIn integration and a makeover for Androidhttps://www.techinasia.com/screenshots-wechat-update-show-linkedin-integration-makeover-android/
https://www.techinasia.com/screenshots-wechat-update-show-linkedin-integration-makeover-android/#commentsWed, 22 Jan 2014 09:02:48 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=161649China’s most popular messaging app and social network WeChat’s upcoming version 5.2 update will likely come with LinkedIn integration and a new interface for Android users, according to Pingwest. The following screenshots come from a private beta version, so the updates aren’t final, yet.

This is a major move early in LinkedIn’s official Chinese career, especially since it doesn’t even have a Chinese-language site yet.

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) first revealed it had plans to officially expand to China last week when the professional networking site announced it hired a new president for LinkedIn China in the form of Derek Shen. Company shares rose strongly on the news.

Unlike most popular western social networks, LinkedIn is not censored or blocked in China, and it has over four million registered members there. Many analysts predict a Chinese-language version in the near future.

Android makeover

WeChat v5.2 is currently in private beta, so it’s not yet ready for the public to download. Screenshots of the next iteration reveal a native-looking Android app for the first time ever, fitting in nicely with Android 4.x phones. WeChat’s current UI is dated, looking like it’s ripped straight from an old version of iOS.

The most noticeable difference is that the bottom navigation menu has been moved to the top of the screen (in line with Google’s UI guidelines for Android 4.x apps) and it includes only three buttons: search and two dropdown menus. The reviewer in Pingwest’s article praised the changes, saying some of the functions that took too much digging before are now much easier to find.

No exact dates have been given for when the WeChat update will get a public release.

Filipinos love social media. As of last year, 95 percent of Filipinos are already using sites like Facebook and Twitter. Tech in Asia has also noted how social media has been used in special ways in the Philippines this year. To help the social media inclined, telco Smart Communications has released an app that allows its subscribers to access social a myriad of networking sites through what it calls the PowerApp.

However, the service is off to a rough start. Over half of Android user-reviewers have given it a negative score. Some are complaining about being unable to verify the sim card, which means they can’t use the app.

The service allows users to access social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Path and Waze. Initially available to prepaid and postpaid Smart and Talk ‘N Text users, it provides access to these seven sites for free, without additional data charges until January 15.

To activate the free unlimited access to social apps, subscribers can register for the free package within the app.

The telco assures that subscribers can use the mobile app without hidden charges. Michele Curran, data and international services head at Smart, says: “PowerApp provides free and unlimited notifications so users can continue to receive updates from background apps without having to incur additional data charges.” Users will also be notified when they are about to access a site or app that is outside their current package subscription.

After the promo period, subscribers can continue using the app for Php 10 ($0.23) for three hours or Php20 ($0.45) for one day.

Aside from the social package, users can also use email, social photo apps and chat apps through PowerApp. Smart subscribers can use these with its three-hour and one-day promos. Or, the telco also allows users to have unlimited access to all the available social apps and email within Power App for Php 30 ($0.67) for 24 hours or Php 15 ($0.34) for three hours.

A few months back, its competitor telco Globe Telecom has also offered free use of Facebook for its subscribers.

Power App is available as a free download on Android. Meanwhile, iPhone and feature phone users can also access free social network usage by sending an SMS with the text FREE SOCIAL to 5555 for prepaid, postpaid, Infinity and Talk ‘N Text users. Smart freedom plan subscribers can send this SMS to 9990, and Smart postpaid All-In users can send it to 7577.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/philippine-telco-launches-powerapp-access-social-networks-bad-reviews/feed/0Linkedin is now available in Thai languagehttps://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-thai-language/
https://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-thai-language/#commentsWed, 18 Dec 2013 05:30:11 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=158045

According to its official blog, Linkedin is now available in Thai language starting today. This marks the third Southeast Asian language Linkedin added to their platform after Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, and Tagalog.

Linkedin now has over eight million users in the Southeast Asia region. Indonesia is the 3rd fastest growing country for the platform, as of January 2013. In addition, after the launch of Bahasa Malaysia, the company finally hit its one million user milestone late last year. It also has one million users in the Philippines, another country with a translated version, as of earlier this year.

Evidently, localizing the site has helped the company’s users base grow. With Thais placing near the bottom (55 out of 60 countries) in an EF’s English Proficiency Index, having the site available in the local language could break down barriers and help add more users to the platform.

If you’re interested in using the Thai interface on LinkedIn, you can do it here.

Among major social media sites, China blocks Twitter and Facebook (among others); heck, it even blocks Slideshare! But not LinkedIn. I might be jumping to conclusions too soon (I mean, things get blocked in China pretty rapidly) but it seems safe to assume that China knows LinkedIn has much to offer to the middle kingdom. Enough, apparently, to keep it from getting blocked.

Firstly, China has a hard time connecting with the rest of the world through the web. Besides email, LinkedIn is probably the only common major social networking platform that can be accessed by both people in China and the rest of the world. While email is great for one-time threaded communication, it is hardly a tool to keep track of the statuses and updates of your business colleagues. And for obvious reasons, there aren’t many foreigners on Chinese social networks like Weibo or Renren. The most successful Chinese SNS overseas is probably WeChat with 70 million users outside of China. But I bet many of them are Chinese residing overseas.

Secondly, since LinkedIn has no localized site in simplified Chinese, most Chinese on LinkedIn know at least basic English. So naturally, it’s a useful tool for companies to look for talents who are well-versed in both languages and have a more global mindset. If China blocked LinkedIn, even the state-owned corporations wouldn’t be able to easily find those talents. LinkedIn acts as a filter that can help employers find folks who are proficient both languages.

Thirdly, avid users of the platform know that LinkedIn is a great resource for overseas business deals. So the three million Chinese on LinkedIn probably find it useful digging for potential connections and deal flows that they simply can’t find on domestic sites like Tianji or Ushi. While China web is pretty closed-off in general, having LinkedIn allows three million Chinese users to connect with the world, which might not be a bad thing.

With over 3,000 years of inventions and culture, we can’t expect China to change immediately into an open society. But gradually it should get there and LinkedIn seems like it could help (even it has only three million users). Plus, the government can also conveniently point to LinkedIn as an example of it being “open” when it’s criticized for blocking other social sites. And politically, there isn’t much need to block LinkedIn because it isn’t the most ideal platform to stage a huge revolt. LinkedIn users probably don’t have time for that. Seriously, they are on LinkedIn for business, not to be part of a movement.

If LinkedIn remains unblocked, and I believe it will, I reckon it should do very well in China. Local competitors are probably having a hard time fighting for the top talent (despite Tianji claiming that it has eight million users as of November last year) because their platforms aren’t connected to the world. To me, it is a winner-takes-all game and LinkedIn seems to have the edge with its global appeal, connecting China to the world of business and thus making it hard for China to block it.

We’re inundated with social media these days. I consider my friends who aren’t on Facebook lucky, they don’t have to deal with the onslaught of senseless status updates and the latent narcissism that it entails. Facebook has slowly but surely blurred the lines between friends and acquaintances and strangers, but hasn’t put much emphasis on close friends and family. This is where PassedOn comes in.

The startup, based here in Ho Chi Minh city, Vietnam, focuses on creating an online diary of experiences with your loved ones for the English-speaking global market. And as the name implies, creating an album of videos, photos, soundbytes, and thoughts with them before you or they pass on.

The project has been online since November 2012 and already has over 100,000 users with “some more active than others”. Marco Oparq, CEO of PassedOn, has his sights set on working with companies like Dropbox to add value by personalizing their services instead of working with big companies like Facebook and Google. All of the data on PassedOn is encrypted so not even Marco knows how users are using the service.

I chatted with Marco for some insight into what he terms intimedia and the story behing PassedOn:

Intimedia is a new generation of websites that are more private and intimate than the jungle of social media that is currently offered. The WWW has an overload of information sharing and too few places that you can consider for yourself and your direct loved ones.

Marco goes on to say that Facebook is for friends, Twitter for business and friends, LinkedIn for business, dating sites for new lovers, but for your mother, daughter, and best friend, there isn’t a website that takes care of people you currently care about.

How did you come up with the idea?

Marco: I was on a holiday to Cuba with my wife, and the airplane had turbulence. At that moment, I realized that if the airplane would have crashed, basically we had nothing arranged. My kids were with my parents in law in Colombia, and they don’t know my parents, they don’t even have the contact number. Nobody in Vietnam knew where I was, and actually my parents in Holland, didn’t even know I was on a holiday.

Then I thought, I’m surely not the only one who hasn’t taken care of the basics (bank details, crucial information, etc.). Then a couple of months, I started to talk with people and see if it would be a nice idea to have an online portal to arrange these necessities in case something unexpected happens. Throughout these months, I realized that in fact it is more important to leave behind your thoughts and emotions than the actual administrative parts.

What happens when a user dies?

Marco: When a user dies, the “eWills” will be released to their loved ones and added to their profile. Later, we will add functions like being able to receive a printed version of the eWill in a nice book and allowing the people to “Leave a message to the World”.

But Marco emphasizes that PassedOn is not about death:

Marco: In general, I think it is good to mention that PassedOn is not about Death it is about realizing who and what is important for you and get a certain peace of mind that you have collected these thoughts and moments in a special place so you can share it with those you care most about.

What about older generations who are not accustomed to services like this?

Marco: First: the UI will be more visual. Second: we use the first wave of members (young mothers) to teach them. They are surely a target group.

I asked what Marco thinks of other competitors in this space like Deadsocial, LivesOn and Legacy Locker, but he says that these services don’t focus on the emotional ties between loved ones. PassedOn is decidedly about preparing “for only the few people before you are not here anymore, and only they can see it at that time.” Google has also entered this space with its Death Manager today.

The project plans to do a UI refresh this month, release a new app in the beginning of May, and start a new service that allows people to email their pictures and data directly into the service.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/passedon-connects-loved-kick-bucket/feed/5Indonesia is Social: 2.4% of World’s Twitter Posts Come From Jakarta (INFOGRAPHIC)https://www.techinasia.com/indonesia-social-jakarta-infographic/
https://www.techinasia.com/indonesia-social-jakarta-infographic/#commentsWed, 13 Mar 2013 01:00:19 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=112733Brand24.co.id, an Indonesian company that monitors social marketing online, has come out with this interesting new infographic about Indonesia’s online socializing. It shows how the country – and particularly residents of the capital, Jakarta – has taken to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and YouTube in huge numbers 1.

The infographic shows Jakarta is very social, ranked second in terms of the world’s top cities on Facebook (Bangkok is first). When it comes to Twitter, Jakarta alone contributed about 2.4 percent of the 10.6 billion Twitter posts made worldwide from January to March this year. Tokyo came close, creating 2.3 percent of all tweets. The nation as a whole has 29 million Twitter users.

When it comes to startups in the country, Indonesian humor site MalesBanget made it to the number one spot for the size of its local YouTube account. Besides cheering for celebrities Agnes Monica and Sherina Munaf, around 4.7 million Indonesian Twitter users read their astrology forecasts through @tweetramalan every day.

See more stats about brand pages and LinkedIn’s popularity in the full infographic:

For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.

The data is compiled from statistics by SocialBakers and MediaBistro from the end of 2012 to this month, March 2013.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/indonesia-social-jakarta-infographic/feed/0LinkedIn reaches 200M members worldwide; Indonesia 3rd fastest growing countryhttps://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-reaches-200m-members-worldwide-indonesia-3rd-fastest-growing-country/
https://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-reaches-200m-members-worldwide-indonesia-3rd-fastest-growing-country/#commentsThu, 10 Jan 2013 05:42:12 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=49032LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network on the Internet, has reached 200M members, it announced today. It claims that one new member joins the social network every 2 seconds, a staggering number that adds up to about 15.7M a year. Indeed, since November 1, 2012, it has added around 13M members.

The company adds that it now has about 160M monthly unique visitors, making it the 23rd most visited web property in the world, according to comScore. 37M of LinkedIn’s users come from Asia-Pacific, with Indonesia becoming the 3rd fastest growing country in terms of members on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) announced yesterday that it has reached the 200 million user milestone. And to mark the occasion, Linkedin released an infographic illustrating some insights about the company’s growth so far.

Drilling down to Asia, we can see that India is still the number one country in the region on LinkedIn, and is the fifth-ranked country overall with 18 million members. The fastest growing Asian country is Indonesia, which according to LinkedIn’s ad creation tool, has around 1.7 million members at the moment and is now the third ranked Asian region in terms of users. Surprisingly, China represents Asia’s second largest LinkedIn user base with around 2.8 million members.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-200-million-indonesia/feed/1Hari Krishnan, LinkedIn’s first Asia-Pacific employee, is now managing director for Asia-Pacific and Japanhttps://www.techinasia.com/hari-krishnan-linkedins-first-asia-pacific-employee-is-now-managing-director-for-asia-pacific-and-japan/
https://www.techinasia.com/hari-krishnan-linkedins-first-asia-pacific-employee-is-now-managing-director-for-asia-pacific-and-japan/#commentsTue, 08 Jan 2013 08:15:38 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=48747Professional social network LinkedIn announced today that it has appointed a new managing director for Asia-Pacific and Japan. He is Hari Krishnan, the company’s first Asia Pacific employee who joined in 2009.

Now based in LinkedIn’s Asia-Pacific headquarters in Singapore, the veteran tech executive and entrepreneur was formerly LinkedIn’s country manager for India. In his three years there, he set up operations from the ground up and grew the social network’s presence from 3.4M registered users in November 2009 to over 18M in December 2012.

He’s replacing Arvind Rajan, who has moved on to become managing director and vice president of New Markets, where he will focus on evaluating new market opportunities across the globe.

Hari has worked at some of the top tech firms in his decade-plus of work experience. He was a product manager and customer support engineer at Cisco Systems, then a business development and strategy manager at Yahoo! India, and a VP for corporate planning and marketing at Travelguru.

He then moved on to start Stylkist.com, an online lifestyle boutique (the domain name’s no longer in use), and joined MySpace India as country head for a year before his stint at LinkedIn.

“LinkedIn has grown tremendously in the Asia-Pacific region over the past year, but we are still in the early stages of our expansion,” Hari said.

The social network has grown its footprint in Asia in recent years. It now has ten offices, over 350 employees, four Asian languages, and 37M registered users in the region — up from 12M a year ago.

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) is announcing today that it has surpassed the one million user milestone in Malaysia. The company launched its Bahasa Malaysia language site late last year (along with Indonesian and Korean), and appears to be growing well since then.

The professional social network boasts a sign up rate in Malaysia which is faster than the global average of two new members per second.

According to LinkedIn’s own ad creation tool (which it disclaims is an approximation), Malaysia had a user base of more than 600,000 over a year ago, and in comparison to other regions around Asia, Malaysian users do indeed seem to be signing up fast. Indonesia, which also received language support last year, has over 1.3 million users according to the ad tool. The company says it passed 1 million users on February 21, 2012.

Of course, India is still the undisputed Asian champion of LinkedIn with around 18 million users (officially 17 million+ as of October 10, says LinkedIn). Interestingly, the network still hasn’t made much progress with Japanese users it seems (despite its past efforts), so it remains to be seen if the company will continue to push much there. As for Korea, it looks to have just over 300,000.

For the Asia Pacific region as a whole, LinkedIn has about 34 million members in total.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-million-malaysians/feed/1LinkedIn Survey: Engineering and Teaching Professions are Most Wanted in Singapore [INFOGRAPHIC]https://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-survey-survey/
https://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-survey-survey/#commentsFri, 16 Nov 2012 08:56:03 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=99365When I was a kid, it was often drilled into my head that I should become a doctor or a lawyer someday. But deep down I aspired to be Wonder Woman. While everyone has their own dream job, a recent study by LinkedIn revealed that out of 8,000 professionals surveyed globally, engineering was the most desired profession in countries like India, Indonesia, and Singapore. Whereas for Hong Kong and Australia, being a scientist or a pilot seemed to be a popular aspiration for professionals during their childhood days (see infographic at bottom).

Singapore, out of the 393 professionals surveyed, engineering and teaching took the top spots for males and females respectively. Below are some of the statistics of the most favored jobs in the country:

As for dream jobs like astronaut, artist, zoologist, or race car driver, those stood at 2.5 percent, 1.8 percent, 0.3 percent, and 1 percent respectively. I guess I wasn’t alone, standing side by side with the 1.3 percent wanting to become superheroes someday. And yes, people do dream of becoming princes or princesses (0.5 percent), and even ninjas (0.3 percent) too.

According to LinkedIn, we have some pretty awesome careers among the site’s members in Singapore. There are apparently 4,700 who are fashion stylists, 115 geologists, and two archaeologists residing here in Singapore.

It was also revealed that having a high salary is not the main allure of a dream job. In fact, more than 70 percent of the professionals surveyed said that “taking pleasure in your work” was most important, followed by “helping others.”

It’s interesting when schools opt for technology to find better solutions. As reported by The Times of India, the IIM-A has partnered with LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) to help connect its students to recruiters through the professional social network’s groups function.

To take advantage of this, students must have a LinkedIn account. So far, there are over 31,000 LinkedIn users at IIM-A.

Besides alumnus, the LinkedIn group will also include headhunters and recruiters. And as time passes, the group will become armed with a great network and resources for future graduates to tap into. It would be interesting to see if LinkedIn could follow this same approach for other colleges across Asia.

Coincidentally, I also stumbled upon a comment from LinkedIn’s APAC boss Arvind Rajan, calling the agreement, “A great partnership between IIM-A, Indian’s top business school, and LinkedIn.”

Recently LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) announced a new feature that allows people to follow influential business and thought leaders of their choosing. These leaders will post articles from time to time, sharing their knowledge and professional insights. You can also comment on the articles, and if you’re lucky, the leaders might even reply back (though we think that is quite unlikely as these people are highly busy with their own daily businesses already).

There are articles on various topics already from the current 150 thought leaders. Among them, Kaifu Lee’s post about the reason American companies fail time and time again when expanding business to China is quite interesting. Startups might also be interested to hear about US-based entrepreneur Andrew Chen’s thoughts on the startup industry. Rakuten’s CEO Hiroshi Mikitani and Freelancer’s CEO Matt Brie are there too [1].

One crazy thought of mine though – will people spam the articles just to have the chance to send a message? For example, maybe Indonesians would send a lot of comments over LinkedIn if US President Barack Obama wrote articles regarding a controversial anti-muslim film. Would they do really do that? I certainly hope not.

LinkedIn is also open to people interested in becoming one of its thought leaders. You can check more information about it here. But who else would you like to see added? We’d love to hear from you about this.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-follow-business-leaders/feed/5Kaifu Lee: Chinese Internet Users Are Younger Than Youhttps://www.techinasia.com/kaifu-lee-chinese-internet-users-younger/
https://www.techinasia.com/kaifu-lee-chinese-internet-users-younger/#commentsThu, 04 Oct 2012 01:08:34 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=94227China’s internet is massive, but who exactly is using it? It’s a question that plagues many Western companies looking to work their way into China. In a recent post on LinkedIn, Innovation Works founder Kaifu Lee shared his thoughts on the biggest difference between Chinese internet users and American ones. According to Lee, it’s actually not what you’re probably thinking — the biggest difference is age. Lee’s post included the following infographic that illustrates just how large the gap really is.

According to Lee:

The average Chinese internet user is almost young enough to be the average American user’s son/daughter! That is why Chinese users tend to use less email and more IM, less e-commerce and more games, less search and more blogging.

He did admit, though, that his data comes from a study from “before mobile and SNS really took off in China” so those numbers are probably pretty old. Lee says he’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, an interesting discussion seems to be taking off in the comments section and Mr. Lee has even personally responded to one comment, so head on over to the page and toss in your two cents!

Perhaps by now, most people realise what is the next wave in the internet industry. It’s mobile.

At Techweb’s IT Conference yesterday, Renren’s (NYSE:RENN) Vice President Huang Jing, and the deputy CEO of JingWei, Lee Youcai, shared some insights on how mobile will affect the landscape of China’s social networks, especially in the field of professional networking, where LinkedIn has been very successful. Huang says that China has the potential to replicate LinkedIn’s success, but he believes that mobile social networking is how China will answer, noting that 60 percent of Renren users are doing so from a mobile.

Almost everyone carries a mobile phone these days, and more and more people are using mobile to access the net. According to Huang, LinkedIn experienced 80 percent growth in China, and 111 percent in Indonesia where it has the biggest number of users in 2011. To date, China has approximately over one million LinkedIn users.

There are already quite a few LinkedIn clones in the market, such as Tianji, Dajie, Ushi, Zhenhedao, etc. And precisely because there are too many of such similar and perhaps mediocre products, users are confused and the market share is diluted. That’s probably why the professional social networking market has not developed in China.

Huang also feels that there is a need for a breakthrough product in the market and he commented that JingWei’s mobile name-card app is a positive indication that developers are still trying to fill this gap in the market and there are many possibilities. Weijing is basically a social media app created for business professionals. It is very similar to Youlu (YCard), another business-oriented app that collates name-card information onto your smartphone.

As the market shifts towards mobile, and there’s also a huge demand for a professional network, it won’t be long before we experience the next social media hit in China. Watch for it.

From time to time, startups do have to outsource some work to third-party vendors. It could be design, backend, or mobile expertise that a startup is looking for. But sometimes, it is hard to find a tried and tested development firm or freelancer to help you out. This is also where ContractIQ comes in, which describes itself as a service that curates “real-time credibility data about service providers.”

ContractIQ is a platform that helps you search for trusted development firms; the data is submitted by folks who have tried their service. But these aren’t any old Tom, Dick or Harry. Folks who recommend someone do so in a way that it’s tied to their LinkedIn accounts (pictured below). Co-founder Ashwin Ramasamy shares with me more about his startup service:

ContractIQ’s discovery engine runs on top of LinkedIn API. When a startup founder recommends an agency for a specific service (say, mobile app development), our engine automatically tells the recommender’s network that he/she has had a positive experience. The message is also broadcasted within the ContractIQ network. This gives the buyers, and us, a real-time feed of recommended agencies that can be further evaluated.

Recommendations for developers from folks who hired them, with links to the developers' LinkedIn profiles. Click to enlarge.

The evaluation process within ContractIQ is also a mixture of community-driven submissions and algorithms. Ramy reveals that there are a total of 54 differentiators to decide if a dev firm/agency is contextually relevant. After eight months, ContractIQ claims to have over 15 product engineering transactions, and 50 agencies across 11 countries using its service. Ramy says that all these are achieved based on word-of-mouth with zero spending on marketing.

ContractIQ does have some competitors such as freelance marketplaces like Elance. But the service looks promising as credentials and recommendations are highly curated through its community, algorithm, and also its deep integration with LinkedIn’s real-name professional social network.

On future plans, Ashwin tells me:

We just started with the discovery part now and we have much to innovate within ‘discovery’. We shall progressively expand the scope of the platform over the next 12 to 18 months. We are indeed open to strategic investments and are looking to expand our founding team.

China-based professional social network, Ushi, shared some of its plans for the future today. And they are ambitious plans too, I think.

In the statement, Ushi said that it is looking to be profitable by 2013. And it is going to do it by providing human resources solutions to HR managers, helping them find talent across its network. Ushi’s core members are white collar workers, investors, HR managers, and entrepreneurs, so the product will be built to cater for this core group.

Regarding LinkedIn, Ushi believes that the U.S.-headquartered professional network isn’t working well in China. Ushi explains that LinkedIn’s “Do it yourself” model hasn’t been popular in China. In contrast, China-based Ushi claims it understands what professionals in the country really want and thus is “gradually gaining acceptance” in the market.

Ushi is also looking to the West for inspiration on how it could better engage with entrepreneurs and investors who are registered on its network. In fact, CEO Dominic Penaloza is currently in the U.S. discussing the possibility of working with AngelList closely. Penaloza said that Ushi has been studying how AngelList works, so it looks like there’s a fair chance that Ushi will have AngelList-like features in the future too. On a side note, there are in fact similar services in China, like AngelCrunch for example.

Personally, I’m not sure what exactly the communication goals are for Ushi. I would have thought most Chinese companies are usually silent about their strategic movements, so as not, to use a Chinese expression (“hit the grass and alert the snake“). But Ushi seems to be pretty transparent about its plans and I’m sure competitors are listening.

I have been following this LinkedIn China group for quite some time. It keeps me updated on job movements in China, ranging from IT to financial roles. The group sends out email updates on job opportunities posted by recruiters. It also has a long list of career network subgroups for different regions and expertises too (see below).

The group was created and is managed by Thomas Zhou who is a partner at DaCare International, a firm that helps foreign companies recruit talent in China. It’s an interesting use of LinkedIn to get crowdsourced job postings focusing just on the Chinese market. Zhou’s LinkedIn profile also states that he is a “China LinkedIn/Social Media Strategist” who helps other companies better make use of the professional social networking platform.

The group announced recently that it has over 70,000 members which is a pretty healthy number considering its niche nature.

LinkedIn has about two million users in China. Though that is a small chunk of its total user count at 161 million, it does suggest that LinkedIn is a useful platform for China, especially when jobs are at the international level. While Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China – LinkedIn has an edge merely by still being accessible.

Tianji, a similar local service, previously told us that it is attracting 500,000 users each month which looks like a healthy growth figure. We haven’t heard much about Ushi which is another similar service in China.

In Asia, LinkedIn has offices in India, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. We were told several times in the past by LinkedIn that China isn’t quite yet in the pipeline, though my gut feeling tells me otherwise. Anyway, if you’re on Linkedin, don’t hesitate to connect with me.

The Hubblr dashboard now support's China's Renren (pictured) as well as Sina Weibo.

Last winter we looked at Hubblr, a dashboard for global social marketing that includes support for China’s Sina Weibo as well as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Back then it was in private beta. But now the startup’s founder, Michael Lam, informs us that it’s launching officially this week with lots of refinements and also brings support for brands to engage consumers on Renren, the Facebook-esque social network. Now that it’s fully open, Michael says that the Australian startup’s “target market is brands or organizations who engage with their customers in both Western and Chinese social networks.”

The main web app at Hubblr.com is where all the posting and analytics (pictured below) action happens, and the slick service is reminiscent of HootSuite – except that Hubblr includes China’s two hottest social media that have the kind of moneyed, blue collar workers that brands chase after. The startup has given us some stats from its beta testing period: over 200 organizations signed-up to make use of it; those beta users were managing over 2,200 social profiles with an average of 11 social profiles per organization that participated; and, users came from 15 countries, including China itself, Hong Kong, the U.S., Canada, Vietnam, and beyond.

The Hubblr team has also made some technical changes, such as fine-tuning its pricing system, which has three tiered packages that offer access to a greater number of profile pages. Also, Michael says:

We added representation in Hong Kong [and] migrated our solution across to Amazon Web Services to make it scalable.

Whether you’re a fellow startup that needs to reach out to Chinese consumers on Weibo or Renren, or a major brand with multiple campaigns to run, check out the Hubblr tour, and share your social marketing thoughts in the comments below.

One element of the social media analytics in Hubblr (Click to enlarge); Below is the new Renren login.

Hari V. Krishnan, the country manager for LinkedIn India commented on the milestone:

We are delighted to reach the 15 million member milestone. It demonstrates that professional networking is becoming increasingly important to Indian professionals. In just three years we have scaled our operations in India and our member base has grown by over 300 percent. We attribute this growth to the tools we have developed that help professionals to stay connected, gain insights for their businesses, bag that dream job and ultimately, realize their professional potential.

Besides India, LinkedIn doesn’t really have any staggering user figures in any country in particular, but rather appears to have chipped away at the Asia Pacific market country by country, gradually building its user base. After India, the network appears to be most popular in Australia, China (although it still hasn’t ‘officially’ entered China), the Philippines, and Indonesia.

When we last looked at LinkedIn’s user numbers via its own ad creation tool a month ago, it indicated that the network already had 15 million users in India. But those figures might not be entirely accurate, so we’d rather defer to official numbers released by the company, as they have announced today. Nonetheless, the ad tool does show a good breakdown of how users are distributed across regions, so we’ll continue to make those figures available (see chart above) for that purpose – but with this disclaimer that they are likely not rock solid. ↩

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-15-million-users-india/feed/0Beepmo Mobile App to Provide Professional Networking Service for Next Bank Asia Conferencehttps://www.techinasia.com/beepmo-next-bank-asia-conference/
https://www.techinasia.com/beepmo-next-bank-asia-conference/#commentsWed, 02 May 2012 12:00:39 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=76964

Back in February we told you about Beepmo, which at the time had just launched in public beta. The mobile service is billed as an Asia-focused location-based social network which targets professionals. By using information from your LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) account, it populates your Beepmo profile so you can use the service.

Despite the fact that Beepmo is just a few months old, we got word today from founder Simon Lower that the service will has partnered with the Next Bank Asia Conference (in Singapore, May 9th to 10th) to provide real-time, location-based professional networking to participants. He explains:

Beepmo was designed to help professionals expand their network and discover business opportunities around them. Beepmo really comes alive at events and conferences and we’re thrilled to be partnering Next Bank Asia.

According to the announcement, Next Bank Asia will be listed as a premium event in the Beepmo app. From there participants can browse the profiles of nearby attendees [1], as well as other important event information such as speaker lists and the event schedule.

Beepmo is currently available for iOS, Android, and Blackberry, so that should cover the majority of conference attendees, most likely. If you’d like to give the app a try on your own smartphone, you can check it out over on Beepmo.com.

This is done by showing relative distance, as opposed to showing the location of others on a map. ↩

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/beepmo-next-bank-asia-conference/feed/1LinkedIn Announces Latest Asia Push, a New Office in Hong Konghttps://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-opens-hong-kong-office/
https://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-opens-hong-kong-office/#commentsTue, 24 Apr 2012 06:45:03 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=76093LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) today announced the opening of a new office in Hong Kong, the company’s ninth office in the Asia Pacific region and 25th office globally. The new office will support the nearly half a million members in Hong Kong, as well as “the millions of members in the North Asia region.”

As LinkedIn already has offices in India and Japan, the North Asia reference almost certainly refers to China where the network has over two million members, the third most in the Asia Pacific region after India and Australia. (Note that this is according to the LinkedIn’s ad tool, which I’m going to accept as an approximate indication of the actual regional member counts [1])

Overall in the Asia region, LinkedIn claims more than 25 million members as of early February – check the breakdown in the chart on the right – which is a significant portion of its 150 million members around the world.

When we spoke with the company’s APAC vice president Arvind Rajan back in February at out Startup Asia event, he noted that the company is “studying” and “thinking about” China, but doesn’t have a presence there yet, adding that it’s an exciting market where many western companies have tried and failed.

The Hong Kong office will have about a dozen local staff, according to the company’s announcement. You can check out LinkedIn’s own infographic about its Asia presence below, as well some characteristics about its membership in Hong Kong.

The reason I say approximate is that the ad tool currently lists regional membership totals that when put together, do not actually exceed 25 million. So there’s a discrepancy somewhere. We have previously asked LinkedIn for membership breakdown, but so far we don’t have anything more accurate than its ad tool. ↩

LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD) is continuing its strong Asia push, having passed the 25 million user mark in the APAC region back in February. The service officially launched in Japan back in October, and opened an office there as well. And just yesterday the company launched a LinkedIn Navi site, in an effort to more fully explain the service to potential Japanese users.

The site can be accessed at jp.navi.linkedin.com, and from there users can find out what LinkedIn is, and how to use it and benefit from it. There is also a helpful video (see below) to break down what LinkedIn is about, as well as user interviews that shed some light on why the service is useful [1].

The idea of developing this sort of stand-alone ‘navi’ site is not a new one. Readers might recall that there was a similar sort of Navi Facebook site launched in Japan last year. Before that, there was howtotwitterinjapanese.com, although it has since gone offline.

Creating these sort of sites as a part of your localization strategy is an interesting tactic that I don’t recall seeing in many other regional markets. But you can’t hand-hold your users too much, so it’s definitely wise for LinkedIn – and any other company aspiring to enter Japan – to create a thorough, one-stop informative destination to educate new users.

Currently, LinkedIn’s own ad creation tool estimates there are about 426,000 members in Japan. So apparently the professional social network still has a lot of work to do. But this Navi site is certainly a good step towards reaching out to potential users in Japan.

Anyone familiar with the Japanese tech scene may recognize a number of familiar faces in the ‘user interviews’ video, such as Joi Ito who is helping out LinkedIn in Japan, and Ryo Umezawa, who we have mentioned on this blog before. ↩

We’ve been watching LinkedIn’s (NYSE:LNKD) growth in Asia over the past year or so. Just last month the network announced it had reached 25 million users in the Asia Pacific region. While the vast majority of those users are in India, the network is making progress in other Asian nations.

Today the company announced that it has just hit the one million members milestone in the Philippines. This brings the Southeast Asia’s representation on LinkedIn up to about four million. According to Clifford Rosenberg, the company’s managing director for Australia, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia:

LinkedIn is about connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful and this milestone demonstrates that professionals in the Philippines are interested, and in fact are already seeing significant benefit in building their online brands on LinkedIn.

There’s still lots of room to grow as well, as internet penetration in the country is growing year by year (see chart on the right) [1]. As of 2010 there were nearly 30 million internet users in the Philippines, and the current numbers might up around 35 million or even more.

According to LinkedIn, there are some interesting characteristics about its members in the Philippines thus far. The top industry represented among the one million members is ‘Information Technology and Services.’ LinkedIn also notes that there are 62,723 members with ‘entrepreneur’ in their title, which is a good sign for the business community.

In the modern world, in whatever business you are running, social media presence has become part and parcel of life. Most start-ups and some major corporations that have experimented with social media and now reaping benefits in customers engagement, management of PR crisis and announcing new initiatives.

So if you want to enter the new world of social media, what are the social media assets you really need?

The good news is that most of these assets are free and setting up is relatively easy, the real challenge is the management of these assets.

In this post, I will provide a list of minimum viable social media assets you can’t do without.

Twitter accounts & lists

A Twitter account is good for conveying announcements and news about your company. Some companie,s like Starhub, deploy Twitter for customer engagement. Whenever you have major announcements, you should be able to tweet and get friends, evangelists and champions of your company to help you spread the word.

Customer engagement is a slightly trickier and requires the person who handles the account to be able to make tactful comments and be empathetic to the needs of the customer. With social media, it’s easy to get into controversy.

In the case of some businesses that are location or offers specific, you should probably create two twitter accounts: one for announcements, news and offers and the other for customer engagement. Do remember that Twitter does not allow user names (or handles) to be more than 14 characters.

Some companies use their Twitter accounts to create Twitter lists of their employees and seperate them into different departments. It is not a bad idea and allows customers, potential strategic partners or employees within the organization to communicate in real time.

Of course, if you want to do that, make sure that you have a clear policy for your employees on how they should conduct themselves on the social network.

Facebook Pages

With 800M+ members on Facebook, Facebook Pages are now essential for companies and brands for engagement. Facebook Pages have allows you to post updates of your companies (similar to Twitter), put up thoughts and opinions about products to drive customer engagement, poll your Page fans to do some market research and receive feedback from them.

Some organizations have built Facebook apps that integrate with Facebook Pages easily to allow more interactivity between their fans and the brand or organization. The good thing about Facebook Pages is that you can allow multiple admins. You can also interact with the Page while taking on the identity of the brand.

Google Plus Business Pages

If you have a Facebook Page, you should probably have a Google Plus Business Page as well. Why is it important? Google Plus is the default social network for Google now and your Google Plus company and brand page will ensure that you are not left out of the powerful Google search engine.

The Google Plus Pages works similarly to the Facebook counterpart. In addition, you can create Google Hangouts, which are live group video chat sessions, for your community as a means of engaging them.

LinkedIn Groups and Pages

LinkedIn is probably the best tool for corporate recruitment, but what’s the easiest entry step?

First, create a company group and page and get people to follow the latest updates of your companies. In a LinkedIn company page, you can post potential job opportunities and also announcements of your latest product launches, news about your company and also providing some industry updates as a means to engage professionals within the same industry.

In the case of LinkedIn groups, you can use it to conduct discussions with professionals and people around your industry and also share some recent news within the industry. Nevertheless, depending on how you control the group permissions, you act as a facilitator for members within the same group to build relationships with each other and set up potential business opportunities.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/what-are-the-minimum-social-media-assets-you-should-have/feed/0The Start-up of Youhttps://www.techinasia.com/the-startup-of-you-reid-hoffman/
https://www.techinasia.com/the-startup-of-you-reid-hoffman/#commentsWed, 07 Mar 2012 00:55:24 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=33457Whenever I teach the Entrepreneurship course in NTU, I often made the point that my aim is not to teach people how to start companies, but rather to impart some best practices on how successful people build their companies.

Finally, I found a book that echoed exactly the same view. “The Start-up of You” by Reid Hoffman (Co-founder of LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha describes in detail on how one can map the lessons of successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley into their own careers in an uncertain global economy out there. It might be interesting to draw out some of the important ideas sketched out in the book.

“All human beings are entrepreneurs. When we were in the caves, we were all self-employed … finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s where human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became “labor” because they stamped us, “You are labor.” We forgot that we are entrepreneurs.” –Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Prize winner.

The theme of the book is simple: your future success whether in career or any project you undertake, depends on understanding several entrepreneurial strategies. Society can flourish when people start to think entrepreneurially.

The book illustrated on how globalization and technology have changed the way individuals can progress in their careers. Globalization allows corporations to distribute your jobs to cheaper labour out there, for example, outsourcing American manufacturing to China. Technology has been able to simplify workflow in order to utilize less labour in jobs that used to need more people.

After the book sets the stage, it introduces us to a few interesting case studies of successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and mapped out the best practices and lessons that individuals can adopt to manage their own career in the same way.

Most notably, they described a “permanent beta” mindset where all of us have “bugs”. Constant upgrade and development of our skill sets with optimism will allow us to go through a life marked with new challenges and opportunities.

In the chapters which followed, the authors lay out the lessons with case studies of various successful entrepreneurs and corporate executives, for example, the entrepreneurs who founded AirBnB, Paypal and LinkedIn and Sheryl Sandberg who transitioned to a corporate career with successful stints in Google and Facebook.

In each part of the book, the authors give some practical exercises for the individual to work out an action plan. Like entrepreneurs who have to deal with uncertainties, changes and constraints in their own careers, we have to take stock of our assets, aspirations and market realities to develop a competitive advantage.

“Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are. Similarly, it doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked or how passionate you are about an aspiration: If someone won’t pay you for your services in the career marketplace, it’s going to be a very hard slog. You aren’t entitled to everything”– Marc Andreessen

Next, the authors recommend the following strategies for your career which is analogous to building a start-up.

First develop a competitive advantage based on your assets, aspirations and values while adapt to the market realities, then work out a plan A, B all the way to Z and pivot if your initial plan did not work. Then build an extensive network where you build genuine relationships and maintain the relationships you build with the people within the network.

Finally, pursue breakout opportunities and take intelligent risks, and in the end you will be able to navigate your way and build a career.

Sounds simple, but most of us are often stuck in our day jobs, focusing on the details rather than taking a step back to see the big picture. Someone once told me that an entrepreneur needs to understand that everyone works for themselves, and their objective as entrepreneurs is to facilitate employees that the objective of working for yourself and the company stays the same.

Whether you are an entrepreneur or not, you should invest in yourself, and the start-up is you.

]]>https://www.techinasia.com/the-startup-of-you-reid-hoffman/feed/0LinkedIn continues growth in Asia, surpasses one million members in Indonesiahttps://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-continues-growth-in-asia-surpasses-one-million-members-in-indonesia/
https://www.techinasia.com/linkedin-continues-growth-in-asia-surpasses-one-million-members-in-indonesia/#commentsWed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:51 +0000https://www.techinasia.com/?p=33221LinkedIn, the world’s largest social network for working professionals, has grown even larger. It surpassed the one million member mark in Indonesia recently, the company announced today.

The growth in Indonesia follows the launch of its Bahasa Indonesia site in December 2011. Since the debut of the localized site, the number of LinkedIn Groups in Bahasa Indonesia has doubled to over 700.

According to the press release, the top three largest industries with the fastest growing LinkedIn membership are: Oil and energy, telecommunications, and IT and services.

Globally, LinkedIn has grown to over 150 million professionals worldwide, with more than 60 percent located outside the United States. It also has 4 million members in Southeast Asia and more than 25 million members in Asia Pacific.

Drilling down to individual nations, about 700,000 people in Singapore have a LinkedIn account, while the number in Malaysia stands at 720,000.

LinkedIn is the fourth most popular social network in the world, going by site visits. Unsurprisingly, Facebook occupies the top spot, followed by Twitter, Windows Live Profile, and LinkedIn.